Seeking the arc of a new year

The holidays are a swirl of activity filled with rites and rituals, food and drink, gifts and song. But mostly they are about family. The days are precious, both for the moments themselves and the way they allow us to mark the passage of time and the progress of generations. The holidays we celebrate and the new year they usher in lead us to recall the holidays and new years we have celebrated before.

It is in that personal chronology of celebration that we see the arc of our lives, and the way it bends most often toward progress. We see the children now grown into teens and shaping their identities, the teens now young adults starting jobs and finding mates and making their way through the world, the parents and grandparents now embracing joyous and well-earned retirements, and the newest and littlest ones now beginning their own journeys along that arc, taking their first steps, learning their first words, acquiring the knowledge and values all those generations before them acquired not so long ago.

This is not an arc we can easily see in the nation or the world at large right now. Its absence is all the more poignant because the holiday season that delivers the new year brings with it the possibility of change, the freshness of new opportunity, the rekindling of hope. Humans have always welcomed this onset, and that has not changed. But in recent years, it seems more and more people are equally eager — desperate, even — to leave the old year behind.

Is it our polarized society? Our fraught world order? Was this the dominant mood at the end of 1942 as war raged on? Or in the 1960s when the battles were between our own people on the streets of our own cities? Or at the end of 2020 when it was difficult to see a path away from COVID-19? Where is the arc forward in the Middle East? Where is it in Sudan and Ukraine? Where is it in the fight against a warming climate? Against intolerance? Against poverty and hunger?

But to focus on all that was amiss in 2024 would be to miss some wonderful steps that were taken. Overdose deaths plummeted in the United States. Women's sports boomed. Artificial intelligence made amazing strides. Obesity might have plateaued. Youth vaping is declining. Vaccines made major progress against malaria. Notre-Dame reopened in Paris. But when majorities of people in our nation and around the world say things are going in the wrong direction, these positive developments can seem isolated.

Another new year has arrived. May we all see the arc of progress in 2025 — and work to keep everyone moving forward.